Message from Mike Morhaime

A message from Mike Morhaime announcing 600 job losses worldwide, although he states that this will not affect WoW or future development there are reported to be 60 members of the development team on their way as part of this.

My gut feeling is that this is the direct result of those 1.8 million lost WOW subs this year, whatever spin they try and put on it. Healthy, growing organisations retrain and relocate people, not show them the door.

Everyone,

We announced today that we’re in the process of cutting a number of active positions, mostly non-development, throughout the company. I'm sure this announcement has sparked some questions from all of you, so I want take this opportunity to address those as best I can. Over the past several years, the company has grown rapidly and evolved to better serve you and the rest of our global community. Thanks to all of your support, we continue to serve by far the biggest subscription-based MMO community, as well as the most passionate eSports and online gaming communities, in the world.

In order to keep making epic game content while serving players effectively, we have to be smart about how we manage our resources. This means we sometimes have to make difficult decisions about how to best maintain the health of the company. We’re in the process of making some of those hard decisions now.

After evaluating our current organizational needs, we determined that while some areas of our business had been operating at the right levels and could benefit from further growth, other areas had become overstaffed. As a result, we need to scale down some of our departments and part with some of our colleagues and friends here at Blizzard. I know that you all understand how difficult this type of situation can be for anyone who might be affected, so I want to assure you that we'll be offering each impacted employee a severance package and other benefits.

I also want to emphasize that we remain committed to shipping multiple games this year, and that our development teams in particular remain largely unaffected by today's announcement. We're continuing to develop, iterate, and polish

Blizzard DOTA, Diablo III, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria

, as well as other, unannounced projects. We'll have exciting news to share in the coming weeks regarding

Diablo III

's release date, and will soon be holding a private media event to showcase the latest work on

Mists of Pandaria

. It goes without saying that we're working hard to get all of these games in your hands as soon as possible.

You've all come to expect Blizzard to live up to our mission statement with every game, and deliver the most epic entertainment experiences ever. You can continue to expect that and nothing less from us as we move forward.

Depends on what positions are lost within the company. My gut feeling is that most of these will be lost in the help and support department of Blizzard. A loss of that many customers will easily cut down the amount of work the help department does. Also to the 60 staff that are being removed, this could also be due to most of Blizzard games coming to the end of their development cycles. These could be people who didn't show the required skill over the games developement so replace them with new up and coming talent.

I would hazard a guess Blizzard doesn't exactly have many money worries.

Looking at some other reports and stuff it looks like Blizzard employ 4,700 people worldwide, I don't know if anyone can confirm this. If so that 600 people is a reduction of 13% of the workforce, that seems to be a lot more than just a bit of rationalisation of overstaffed departments.

As for money worries, well they have been run by accountants for a good while now and this looks like an accountants move to stave off profit problems a little further down the line.

I was bit curious about the heart of the aspects mount they put in the store recently, looks to me like a mount designed for Mists of Pandaria and maybe was a rush release to the store to perk up Q1 income. Makes me wonder what they know about sub numbers over Jan and Feb.

I was bit curious about the heart of the aspects mount they put in the store recently, looks to me like a mount designed for Mists of Pandaria and maybe was a rush release to the store to perk up Q1 income.

I first thought this as it is pretty obviously chinese-inspired, but then I realised that the model is actually featured in the Dragon Soul raid when Thrall fires the Dragon Soul at Deathwing (hence the name Heart of the Aspects)

I think its impossible to really speculate their real motivations behind this move (although I suspect it is down to Activision pen-pushers) because we'll honestly never really know.